On Monday, February 27, 2017, Chicago Magazine published an article by Bryan Smith, entitled The Doomsday Squad and featuring three members of Argonne’s Global Security Sciences (GSS) division. The article highlights the efforts of Charles Macal of the Systems Science Center (SSC), Megan Clifford of the Risk and Infrastructure Science Center (RISC), Nate Evans of RISC’s Cyber Analysis, Operations, and Research (COAR) group, and the teams that each of them leads.
Smith describes the work of these groups as a bold and brave plunge into the realm of potential disaster for the purpose of optimizing the integrity of Chicago’s critical infrastructure: transportation, power, cyber-infrastructure, etc. Smith writes, “Harnessing Argonne’s massive computing power, they think about precisely what most of us would prefer not to… they imagine the disastrous, envision the catastrophic, and intricately model the apocalypse in its various and horrific guises… building minutely detailed predictive models that show how a given disaster might unfold and, not for nothing, how we might alter the story before the plot turns ugly.” Read more